-The guild Bank Log doesn't work. it's not possible to see who did what with the bank log past a few hours ago. It doesn't overwrite by time, it overwrites by # of entries, so a clever bank thief just has to do a bunch of trivial deposits/withdrawls to overwrite any incriminating evidence and then claim ignorance. This is a very very very bad bug considering the amount of harvested components, gold, time & effort required for The Dawning. Also, the log is still showing events from the first two days of launch (26 days ago) and nothing in between then and now.

-The effect from Invigorate visually drops 4 seconds before the timer should expire. Note: The effect lasts 15 seconds. The visual display of the timer is wrong/inaccurate. Minor bug.

-No level 41-50 dropped or crafted ammo in the game, except for the Dawning arrows, which are barely an upgrade to level 30 crafted arrows, and of only one damage type.

-There is very little visual distinction between Ranger actions. I'm not saying we need to be a kaleidoscope of particles to rival an episode of Pokemon, but a little more variety would go a long way. They're -very- subtle right now.

-All ammo damage types do the same damage amount. There is no variation on any targets that I've fought, even under contrived cirucumstances, and with other classes effects that should allow it to do more damage (Magus Grounded, for example) it makes zero difference.

-Action tooltips do not get updated with points invested in Abilities. An example is Prey's Mark. The base ability states "Reduces the resistances of the target by 517" regardless of how few or many points are invested in Marked for Death.

-Action:Torrent does not work as described, nor does it hit for any reasonable amount of damage. Currently, it randomly pulls random targets from random distances. It never hits more than 2 targets, under the most contrived ideal conditions and is, generally speaking, entirely broken. Upgrades to ammo damage with the ability that provides that does not alter the damage. A level 50 ability that does 200ish damage is quite frankly an embarassment when magus's do 1500+ dmg per target on a conal AE and soldier pbAE's do 640+ dmg per target while in full defensive stance/gear.

-Action:Point Blank is buggy. If used on an incoming target, this ability looks more like a glitch than a knockback, as there are no frames or animations that actually show the knockback. The target merely teleports 3 steps back and continues to advance. The ability -by default- should root the target for 0.5 seconds after the knockback, and the ability that enhances this should simply increase the root duration. Also, randomly, still, after .2103, using Point Blank on a boss mob has a very strong chance of making that boss mob disappear entirely from the game until the next server crash... errr. server reset.

-Action:Heart Toxin is not affected by Prey's Mark or Marked for Death. Heart Toxin does the same damage regardless of how many or of what type any resistance debuffs are on the target. Obviously, if the resist for the damage type that Heart Toxin is doing is debuffed, Heart Toxin should do more damage. It does not.

-Action:Cover Shot has no success or failure text messages, nor any other indication of success or failure. This ability could be doing absolutely nothing and Rangers would have no way to know. Additionally, there are no visual, graphical, or particle effects of any kind to indicate success or failure in any way.

-Action:Acrobatics does not appear to do anything. There is no change in any stat in the character panel when it's active, and the hit/miss rate on the character appears to be identical whether it's active or not. Also, any movement impairments (such as snares) are not cleared as described.

-Action:Mash needs a damage boost, or needs to ignore the offhand damage penalty. Hitting for ~90 damage at level 50 with the Dawning axe in the mainhand is again, a joke.

-Action:Prey's Mark tooltip (when the effect is on the creature) is inaccurate. Or it's correct, and the ability is completely bugged and does not improve with increased ranks. It does not match what the tooltip states. For example, at level 50, the ability should (without Marked for Death) reduce all resistances by 517. When the effect is on a creature, it states it reduces all resistances by 139.

-Ability:Master Predator does nothing. No haste is shown in the character panel, no increased rate of fire is observed, and increasing points into the ability does not increase any effect. The tooltip text also does not change with more points. It simply shows 12% in the tooltip for any amount of points invested.

-Ability:Marking Flare is not worth 1 ability point. 1% less dodge/parry/block? Seriously? Even if there was a logfile available to parse, I seriously doubt you could parse out 1% less dodge/parry/block on a target. This needs to be 5-15% at least to be worth it.

-Ability:Sniper's Draw: Largely pointless. 1 yard per point? Even if it didn't matter in the slightest, the cost is too high for so little gain. 2 points per yard might be worth it, but again, the ranges are so large, no one would ever use this, even in PvP, which is months (or years) away. A useless ability for months (or years) is still a useless ability today.

-Ability:Cover Fire has no value unless we have some indication of how well Cover Shot works, at all, prior to being able to test it in any way. For now, pointless.

General impressions and observations---Rangers are the lowest damage class in the game (either burst, sustained, single target, or AE) from what I've observed from grouping with all other classes at level 50. Even with 966 attack power, (buffed by Rugged Yell) my damage is a pittance compared to all other classes. Having said that, I can kill a single target solo mob without too much trouble. The problem? Soldiers, Magus, and Healers can all kill 2-4 times as many solo mobs in the same time period, with the same or less downtime. With certain points spent in certain trees, certain non-Ranger classes can kill any same-level single target in the game today.

Without a parse-able timestamp client side combat logfile, everything posted above is a narrow selfish opinion at best and ignorant biased misinformation at worst. That's not my fault: There is no client side logging of any kind in the Alganon client, as of this posting time & date. Ball is in your court, devs. Give me a logfile and I'll give you parses. If you want specific feedback regarding the field-by-field or byte-by-byte format the logfile should take, PM me. I've written parsers in perl for 4 other MMO's and would welcome the opportunity to help.

P.S.I would post these as bugs, but my bug interface (either in game or in the browser) is completely garbled, unreadable, and unusable. Finally, I would have posted this in the subscriber forums except there are class specific forums for subscribers.

No tooltips from any class get updated from abilities. It is a "working on" feature but not expected soon.

Level 30 arrows are either too high damage, or all arrows above are way to low. The level 40 arrows in beta were actually lower damage than the level 30. I haven't gotten there yet to check but I have looked into higher level arrows a little.

Thank you for the feedback! Did you put these into /bug reports in-game? We do read all forum posts but we can address issues in a much more timely fashion if they are placed directly into our QA system.

Having said that we have looked at some of the issues already you've posted already. Last week due to the holidays we didn't do a complete patch and as such there's a couple of fixes coming. Ammo damage has been adjusted in some places but do keep in mind that the delay of an arrow is intended to be added to your ranged attacks; raw damage is not all that is supposed to count.

Mash is not intended to be a high damage attack. It's meant to be a button you push for threat while tanking and that could stand to be clarified within tooltips and maybe add an ability or two. We have some other ranger changes regarding tanking coming up but we'll probably be holding off on them until the Dawning is complete.

-Ability:Master Predator does nothing. No haste is shown in the character panel, no increased rate of fire is observed, and increasing points into the ability does not increase any effect. The tooltip text also does not change with more points. It simply shows 12% in the tooltip for any amount of points invested.

As far as this is concerned, it would be nice to have an attack speed and dmg per shot breakdown in stats, with overall white dps as well. However, you mention you are not visually able to see a difference. The slowest bows are around 3 sec attack speed, a 12% reduction in this means its now a 2.64 attack speed, or 0.36 seconds faster. When using a really slow bow, with no extra haste it might be possible to see a difference. But most bows I have come across while leveling are in the 1.5-2.5 sec range, this means that they would only fire .18-.3 sec faster, which would be very hard to notice by just watching you character animations.

As far as killing speed, I am currently at level 40. I have 650 attack power with just predation pressence up, and an extra 100 or so with the weapon barbs I make through LW. The only trouble I run into is when fighting things it seems that are 4 lvls or higher then myself, as leg shot and most things miss. I usually kill things before they get to me, with out using torrent. I dont know what other classes are like however.

Torrent imo is not so much broke atm as glitchy, sometimes it will fire a second shot at a nearby mob sometimes it will not. I think its damage is in the right spot, so far when looking at the numbers, it seems to do about the same dmg as power shot (maybe a tad less) when used against 1 mob. The drawback is it costs more. If they fix the AOE part of it, and possible make it so when used against a single or less then 4 mobs, the dmg stacks, it will be in a good place. By this I mean if you use torrent against 1 mob it hits that mob 4 times, each shot doing less dmg.

One more thing to add about master predator; When I was using and testing it, it appears more points increases the proc chance. It would rarely proc with 1 point, but proc quite a bit more with 5 points. An indication of this functionality would be nice in the tooltip for it.

Also, it seems to proc off any ranged attack, not just power shot. I do not know if this is intended or not.

As far as this is concerned, it would be nice to have an attack speed and dmg per shot breakdown in stats, with overall white dps as well. However, you mention you are not visually able to see a difference. The slowest bows are around 3 sec attack speed, a 12% reduction in this means its now a 2.64 attack speed, or 0.36 seconds faster. When using a really slow bow, with no extra haste it might be possible to see a difference. But most bows I have come across while leveling are in the 1.5-2.5 sec range, this means that they would only fire .18-.3 sec faster, which would be very hard to notice by just watching you character animations.

Yeah, I was talking about the Haste portion of the character screen, where it shows the haste percentages. There's no increase there, so the ability is 100% for sure not adding any haste of any kind. I would never use visual animations as a guaranteed indication, myself.

By this I mean if you use torrent against 1 mob it hits that mob 4 times, each shot doing less dmg.

Yeah, if it did that, with 10% more damage, it might be ok. I'm still calling it completely broken for the moment. The damage it does on a single target for me, with 900+ attack power, is half of powershot, at best, with a crit on Torrent. It's a laughable joke. The only thing good about it (which will doubtless get nerfed if changed) is it's a second ranged attack. Woooeeee. Yep, we get two ranged attacks. It's pretty amazing. /rolleyes

And to Minuvo: No, I haven't. The bug system has been, since beta, basically entirely unusable. Any time I open a bug, my client has a 90% chance to crash. Trying to use the interface via the web causes all the tickets to become garbled, unreadable, and buggy. It's been that way since beta, and I have lost the patience to fight with it. If the bug system is fixed at some point in the future, I'll try using it again. Right now, I'm not paying money and wasting time crashing my client and trying to figure out which random field on the garbled mess of fields is the right one to click on.

Oh, and the delay on all arrows ... Your comments don't apply in the context of Ranger ammo, as all dropped or crafted arrows are the same: 1.0 speed. Also, I have no idea why you would use a Ranger to tank when a Magus tank has the same physical reduction (42% or more), vastly more hit points, and can hold aggro a billion times better by chain casting AE's with every GCD. But maybe the changes will help, who knows.

Yeah, I was talking about the Haste portion of the character screen, where it shows the haste percentages. There's no increase there, so the ability is 100% for sure not adding any haste of any kind. I would never use visual animations as a guaranteed indication, myself.

Unfortunataly, just because it does not show up on the stat screen does not mean its not there. I know my crit% jumps from like 5% to 15% all the time on stat screen, yet still doing same number of crits. The only way to really test if the haste is there as to go to a spot with as little lag possible and use the slowest bow you can find and use a stopwatch or something to time attacks with and with out the buff.

Things that increase melee haste correctly (like potions) do increase the haste display on the character sheet. Other things that are totally broken, like spell haste, do not show up there. It's not possible to get an accurate read on such small amounts of haste with network latency anyway. No sense in slamming your head into a brick wall, they're broken.

I would generally agree with the OP comments having played the ranger to 50 and now working on alts of most the other classes. Is a ranger is to solo up to 50, absolutely. But when it comes time for us to start putting groups together for instances a ranger is going to be my last pick to put in the group. There is nothing they do better then anyone else, and most stuff is substantially worse.

I tried playing Healer a bit and am quite amazed how much better this class feels comparing to ranger. Healer spells hit for almost twice harder, that ranger ones and he can take on two or three mobs easily. Talents make much more sense as well.

... There is nothing they do better then anyone else, and most stuff is substantially worse.

I'm sad to realize this too as there are so many rangers in my guild. The class balance is only a month after soft-launch, but still needs much love. Figure I'll bring up a mage or healer while they can still steam-roller through multiple mobs wearing light armor, or so I hear from others and see from time to time in-game.

Rangers definitely suffer from the curse of the hybrid class, able to do everything to some degree but nothing very well.

For what it's worth, a dev stated in beta that this was by design, rangers are a utility class. That most classes are able to fill two of the three classic roles at 100%, but because rangers can fill them all they need to do each at 75% (or something to that effect).

This is done on purpose by many games when making their hybrid classes so alganon is in relatively good company. The problem with that design approach is that the hybrid classes usually end up being some of the worst effectively - if there is always someone who can do the job better there is never a reason to invite the second or fourth best. This will be even worse here as with only 4 classes and 6 group spots there is no trade off to stacking your group with the best choices.

Especially with the huge ranger population, I don't think this is very wise. Rangers either need to be able to make spec choices that can propel them to being even with the best in one or more of the categories - perhaps by allowing them to reduce their effectiveness in another. Like, for instance, if a strong set of healing abilities existed but it made them very poor tanks or dps.

Another good option would be to make a new role for them. As a utility class they really have very little classic utility. Perhaps rangers should be the primary buffer/debuffer. They could get some castable buffs and debuffs, but they could also get a page from the bard manual and have strong group chants where only one was active at a time. Things like group haste, spell power, regen, and travel speed all would fit pretty well with the class as it is today, give groups a strong reason to bring one along, and allow more than one ranger in a group to be of benefit.

Something serious needs to be done for the ranger to make sure they have any place in a well formed group.

The current on the spot nearly free Respecs don't help the Ranger either. By being whatever the group needs, how often will you get to play how you want to? Also, this makes balancing the Ranger as a DPS or Healer that much more difficult. If you make healing spec kill DPS, then as soon as you don't need healing, you insta-respec back to DPS. QoL can't make one spec or another substantially better, because you can switch between them at the drop of a hat.

I do think that abilities could make Rangers near the top of all fields with penalties towards the other. That sound's like a cool idea. But what penalty is there if you can just switch before each major battle.

PS. They just stealth nerfed Rangers too. Instead of making higher level arrows do more damage, they made mid level ones do less.

You're right that infinite instant respecs would usually be a barrier for this kind of approach, but it really shouldn't be here. After all, mages can currently do this switching between tanking and dps and healers between healing and dps. I assume the current respec situation is at least somewhat temporary, it really shouldn't measure into class balance decisions over the mid-long term.

Design wise, it's probably a bad idea to make it so they can spec to be even with the best for all roles as even if respecs end up rare it would be silly for anyone to roll anything else. But even outside of the rest of the issues rangers should be able to be brought up to 100% healing in some way or another by spec, as currently that's the only roll that just one class fills effectively for tough content.

I don't know how popular the buffing role would be in the ranger community, but it would seem to fit well with the design of the ranger as a utility class. I fear a lot of people didn't realize that when they chose the range though. But giving them a new, unique "strongest" role seems like the best approach in my mind.

They've said that major class changes are being held for the dawning patch though, so it will probably be some months before we see which way they want to go.

Focus - abilities cost way way too much. I really do not think that "ranged" ranger has to gear for soul and intellect.

Prey's Mark - does it really do anything? Could not see difference.

Stun - does not interrupt and castable abilities. The only way to use knockback is together with stun (stun first). But even stunned and knockbacked mob continues to cast ability, and even if the ability is melee it still _will_ hit you.

Torrent is not lvl 50 ability, rather level 31, but I was a bit afraid to use it, since the effect was absolutely unpredictable and undesirable.

Mash and Power Shot has the same cooldown. Why? Anyone thinks rangers do too much damage?

I had real hard time switching between stances in combat, they just refused to do so. Also guardianship stance increased my physical resistance from 20% to 29%. Is it enough? To me it does not sound right for tanking at all.

Talents in shooting tree are... well, underwhelming. Also talent that makes Hear Toxin first tick to do additional damage does not seem to do anything. All ticks are the same.

Bonds are useless for soloing ranger. No idea why he can not cast them on himself. 3% crit is that powerful buff?

... Focus - abilities cost way way too much. I really do not think that "ranged" ranger has to gear for soul and intellect. ...

The reason for this is that every single Ranger focus cost is a percentage, not a fixed value. Therefore, using intellect to expand the focus pool has no effect on how many times you can use an ability. Power Shot uses 22% of your focus pool. Heart Toxin & Arrow Stab? 11% each. Resuscitate 75%. Triage 40%. Yep, two triages is all you get before you're waiting on regen. Rampage 35% , Acrobatics (this one is ridiculous, considering when you'd want to use it) 47%, and almost more ludicrous: Point Blank 43%. /laugh

Which is why it would be great to see medium "of Vigilance" gear up to max level. And it makes you wonder why there is no medium "of Vigilance" past level 27.

Soul/Agi might be viable gear for a Lifeblood Ranger, or even a Ranger that might say, participate in fights that last longer than 10 seconds or want to use more than 4 abilities in a row.

The brutal part? Soldiers don't use focus. Magus can build themselves so they never run out, chain spamming (literally) and Healers never run out either, healing someone fighting elites (tested up to 25 minutes, no problem).

So... yeah... apparently Rangers are the only ones being hammered with both the "requirement" to put soul on every non-armor slot (at the expense of DPS/other/choice gear), percentage based action/ability costs, and an inability to recover focus at the rate of all the other classes that... don't.. need to.

Hm... Is that the smell of a logic failure? Yep, it sure is.

Oh, and the icing on the cake. As Rangers, we have exactly one Ranged attack worth using: Power Shot. Yep, that sure puts the Range in Ranger. Not.

The reason for this is that every single Ranger focus cost is a percentage, not a fixed value. Therefore, using intellect to expand the focus pool has no effect on how many times you can use an ability. Power Shot uses 22% of your focus pool. Heart Toxin & Arrow Stab? 11% each. Resuscitate 75%. Triage 40%. Yep, two triages is all you get before you're waiting on regen. Rampage 35% , Acrobatics (this one is ridiculous, considering when you'd want to use it) 47%, and almost more ludicrous: Point Blank 43%. /laugh

Point Blank sure is laughable ability atm, but wait - are those % of you focus pool? I had a feeling it is based on you base focus pool, not one affected by gear and studies?

Also I have a feeling, that focus return by the autoattacks is tied to you total mana pool. I did not test it extensively, though.

"There is a general misconception on the tooltip with regard to Focus Cost. If something says 40 is the focus cost, that means 40% of your base focus. Which is to say, the amount of focus you have unadjusted by gear/abilities/studies/buffs. As you level up your Focus Pool increases as does the cost of your spells."

Even with what seems like a bug in how much focus is used, I rarely run out at level 33. Using predator stance gives quite a bit of regen. Tool tips no longer give the percentages, just the actual used Focus.

Stances can only be changed out of combat. Not sure if this is intentional or not.

Mash and powershot are supposed to be on the same timer.

I asked specifically if int gear effected base focus and focus use and was told NO. If that is not the way it is, it should be bugged.